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BEA Systems Inc. and Siebel Systems Inc. Monday announced an expansion of their existing partnership to jointly deliver integration solutions.
San Jose, Calif.-based BEA and San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel said they would support each others integration solutions, with BEA supporting Siebels Universal Application Network (UAN) out of the box and Siebel providing support for BEAs WebLogic Integration and WebLogic Platform, the companies said. The companies will partner on development, sales and marketing, and also around emerging integration and process standards in the Web services arena.
BEAs lack of a strategic integration partnership with any major enterprise application vendors “was a recognized hole” in the companys strategy, said Morris Beton, senior vice president of business development at BEA.
Beton said BEA will offer out-of-the-box support for UAN in future versions of BEA WebLogic Integration and WebLogic Platform. Siebels UAN already supports BEA WebLogic Integration 7.0, and BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 with support for UAN Integration Applications is available in beta now and will be generally available this summer, Beton said.
Beton said both BEA and Siebel have committed engineers, technical staff, testing facilities and more than $1 million in marketing support to get behind their integration offerings.
Regarding standards support, BEA and Siebel are teaming on supporting such standards as the business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification, XML Schema, XML Query Language (XQuery), Extensible Stylesheet Transformation (XSLT) and the J2EE Connector Architecture in their products.
Beton said BEA has selected Hewlett-Packard Co. as the preferred hardware platform for the joint BEA WebLogic Integration and UAN solution. And he said Accenture Ltd. and HP will be BEAs strategic global systems integrators for BEA WebLogic Integration implementations on UAN.
“We have at BEA excellent support in the ISV community,” Beton said. “We have about 900 ISVs that support the platform. But one of the things I felt we had a hole in was in some of the large enterprise ISVs, including Siebel, Peoplesoft and SAP.”
However, Beton said one of the ways the integration approach BEA is taking with Siebel differs from that of BEA competitor IBM is that “the functionality we provide in BEA WebLogic Integration and Siebel UAN is the same kind of thing that IBM will go out and custom develop” using IBM Global Services.
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